Elan Steinberg, vice president of the American Gathering of Holocaust Survivors and Their Descendants, said in a statement that his organization was "shocked" by the charges in "Sleeping with the Enemy: Coco Chanel's Secret War," by Hal Vaughan, and "the blithe and unsupported rejection of these charges by the Chanel fashion house."
The book builds on past evidence to describe the secret life of Chanel, a fashion icon, as a "fierce" anti-Semite recruited by the Abwehr military intelligence organization, as well as the lover of Baron Hans Gunther von Dincklage, described as a "Nazi master spy." The book gives her agent number as F-7124 and code-name as "Westminister," after the duke with whom she had another affair.